Harnessing data insights: discovering growth opportunities to achieve business objectives
At Casavo, data lies at the core of our processes. Every time we are tasked with an objective, we assess our product analytics and start from there. Observing how users move about our products guides us towards possible solutions. But it doesn’t stop here: data is central throughout the whole iterative process and every increment is carefully monitored. This approach helps us validate our assumptions and brings value to our daily work thanks to measurable outcomes.
I am Linda and I am a product designer. Our squad is dedicated to enhancing the user experience on Casavo’s consumer website. Regardless of the requirements, our objective is to assist users in finding the product that perfectly matches their needs.
In this article I will talk about how we use data to interpret user behavior, set up strategies and deliver value through measurable improvements.
Our mission: freedom from complexity
The real estate market has always been a dynamic and ever-changing industry, but in recent times, navigating its complexities has become increasingly challenging. Today, aspiring homesellers and homeowners are encountering a landscape marked by unique difficulties. Casavo aims to change the way people sell, live and buy homes in Europe, freeing them from complexity.
Freedom from complexity: Casavo wants to change the way people sell, live and buy homes in Europe.
A compelling website is crucial in today’s digital age, especially in the real estate industry. It serves as a virtual storefront, attracting and engaging potential customers.
Casavo’s consumer website as of today gives access to 3 main experiences:
- Selling a house
- Buying a house
- Obtaining a mortgage
Our team is focused on driving product adoption, which means encouraging users to start interacting with our products. Engagement and usability are key drivers of product adoption. A user-friendly and visually appealing interface encourages users to explore and stay longer. A seamless user experience builds confidence and fosters repeat visits, ultimately leading to higher product adoption rates.
Data can give us insights on how to improve engagement and usability in key moments of the seller/buyer journey to ultimately increase product adoption.
Analyzing data to see the bigger picture
Understanding user journeys
Just like a surgeon has to know the origin of the bleeding to properly stitch a wound, product teams must know how their users are moving around to fix problems. Analyzing journeys helps us focus on the bigger picture and have an idea of where users might get stuck.
A journey bringing users from the homepage to a product can highlight significant drops and unwanted back and forth patterns, giving the team insights on where to focus first.
Casavo’s website has a heterogeneous pool of users, ranging from people who are only curious about house-related topics to people who are actually interested in selling or buying. Journeys therefore can vary depending on the segment. Potential sellers tend to have very short and linear journeys due to the company’s willingness to leverage the sale of houses to mobilize other sectors of the business; but what happens when users take longer paths?
Let’s take a look at an example of non-linear journey:
We can make some assumptions and identity opportunities just by looking at the flow:
Insight 1: The journey is not linear for some users.
- Assumption: Users are going back and forth between pages. They probably don’t understand that they can access products directly from the homepage.
- Opportunity: Provide direct access to products from the website’s homepage to increase product adoption.
Insight 2: Users proceed directly to products
- Assumption: Good news! It is however a sign that users are not exploring the website. Establishing navigation patterns helps users discover the product and empowers the business with a way to guide them to what really matters.
- Opportunity: revise the information architecture and improve interlinking between pages to encourage navigation patterns.
Tip: every opportunity must contribute to the product’s ultimate goal. Defining individual goals for every opportunity forces us to focus on what really matters to the business.
Deep diving key touchpoints
Understanding user behavior where conversion happens is a great place to identify opportunities to improve a product. A first glance at heat maps gives us an idea of how key pages are performing.
Information like scroll-depth and average time on page gives us evidence on user engagement. Users visiting our pages are clearly not interested in what they are seeing: scroll-depth is around 17% and average time on page is maximum 10 seconds. Honestly, how much can you assimilate in just 10 seconds? Probably not as much as the business wants to communicate.
We might focus on improving these metrics by listing a series of opportunities:
- Reduce word count and overall page length.
- Emphasize hierarchy and take advantage of reading patterns for better scanning.
- Choose visuals over heavy chunks of copy.
- Try animations and interactions.
Tip: low engagement doesn’t mean the product is not performing well. Conversion rate to our transactional products happens regardless of how long users stay on a page, so why do we care? Because users tend to remember positive experiences, that’s what brings them back. An engaged user can generate a qualified lead in the future.
Gathering data to validate ideas
Whenever we have an idea of increment, we like to test it against the as-is. This can be done with A/B or usability tests. We choose the former when the increment involves a small part of the product, so that we can see the impact of the change in the real world; we prefer the latter in case of multiple or radical changes impacting the product’s structure.
As our discovery suggests major changes to the product’s navigation and structure, let’s opt for remote unmoderated usability testing. We are going to test our early-stage homepage wireframes against the version in production to validate our assumptions:
Assumption 1: Users can easily find what they are looking for
- Goal: encourage navigation patterns
- Components impacted: navigation menu
- Acceptance criteria: task completion requires less time, tasks are completed through expected paths, error clicks are reduced, bounce and exit rates are reduced.
Assumption 2: Users can access products with no hassle
- Goal: increase product adoption
- Components impacted: secondary navigation
- Acceptance criteria: task completion requires less time, task completion happens within first clicks, error clicks are significantly reduced, bounce and exit rates are reduced.
The results of the usability test are positive.
Even if the product is partially finished, we can register a 13-point increment in usability score*, a reduced bounce rate and a shorter average duration for each task.
- Maze calculates the usability score of a prototype with specific formulas. More information here.
Monitoring data to measure outcome
Data becomes vital, above all, when it comes to measuring outcomes. At the beginning of the process, we identify and start monitoring the metrics related to our goals; after each deploy, we compare the present to the past period and look at what we have achieved.
Let’s see how the homepage is performing in terms of product adoption along with the key drivers: usability and engagement.
Product adoption
Are users starting to use our products more than before?
Now that we’ve validated our hypothesis, let’s see what happens in the real world if we replace the homepage in production with the new version we just designed. To be sure changes won’t negatively affect conversions to our products, let’s launch an A/B test.
The metric tested considers conversion rate from sessions to the house valuation flow (one of our top seller products).
The new homepage has a statistically significant impact on Conversion Rate, registering an increment of +34%. Thanks to these results, we can affirm that the new design is outperforming the old one in terms of attracting and converting users.
Usability
Are users visiting product pages more than before?
One of the major updates in our information architecture consists of extrapolating the business’s services from the hamburger menu on mobile devices. Let’s search for increments in visits to product pages since our major deploy:
We can register a positive trend starting from our major deploy (Apr 27). Accessing the main services seems to be easier for users, especially when visiting the website from mobile devices where every entry point used to be hidden in the hamburger menu.
Engagement
Are users spending more time interacting with the website’s content?
There are several metrics we can consider when measuring improvement related to engagement. How much time users are spending on the product, how far down they are scrolling a specific page, how many of them are leaving without performing any interaction are key indicators of the sessions’ quality.
Let’s look for improvement related to engagement by measuring how much time users are actively spending on the homepage after vs before the deploy:
Users are spending more time on the homepage since our last deploy (Apr 27). During the first 14 days after deploy (Apr 27 — May 3) we can register an increment of 19% in average time on page active compared to the previous period (Apr 20 — Apr 26). This is a sign that the page itself is performing better in terms of engagement, but let’s take a step back and look at the website globally: are users exploring it more than before?
The bounce rate refers to the percentage of visitors who land on the homepage and then leave without interacting with any other page. The exit rate represents the percentage of visitors who exit the website from the homepage, regardless of whether they have visited other pages before. A reduction in both percentages clearly indicates that users are exploring the website more than before.
Conclusions
Product design combined with the insights gained from data analysis can significantly shape the success and trajectory of a business. Translating business objectives in product goals helps us get to where we want one step at a time. By constantly referring to data, we are able to track our progress and bring everyone on the same page when discussing results.
In our everyday work, though, it’s important to not just see the big picture. While quantitative data provides insights on a larger scale, qualitative research cannot be overlooked as it delves into the “why” behind user actions. Combining these two approaches is essential for us to make confident choices and design better products.
